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'Welcome to the smoking room,' he says, taking a drag of his cigarette and waving at his Manhattan showroom. 'The marvellous thing is…' - and he breaks off to peer at my Dictaphone - 'are you recording me? Don't miss a word! Or a single puff of my cigarette! The marvellous thing is that I've been doing it for almost 50 years and I still have fun. It's like a hobby that feeds the wolf at the door rather well.'

That wolf has been growing fatter for decades. Lane's rococo paste jewellery is sold around the globe and has been worn by pretty much every glamorous woman of the past half-century, from Wallis Simpson, who was rumoured to have been buried in one of his jewelled belts, to Nicole Richie. At the other end of the commercial scale his creations have been a stalwart of the shopping channel QVC. Now the online fashion boutique yoox.com is launching Fake Jewels Real Glamour, a collection of both Lane's rare one-off vintage items and pieces that have been in production since the 1960s. Holly Brubach, the site's vintage consultant, says, 'I have known his work for years and worn and loved it.' It was when she saw staff members in their twenties wearing his pieces that it occurred to her to team up with the jeweller.

Lane's work certainly feels of the moment: bright and brash and confident but tempered with the sense of humour that all his pieces have. And, of course, every item comes with heritage - when Lane first started half a century ago it would have been impossible even to imagine an online store. 'When I started there were many more department stores than there are now, but the slack has been taken up by all these new things,' he says.

I ask him if he laments the demise of department stores and, with typically Wildean flourish, he answers, 'I lament nothing. Except my youth.'

Lane, an only child, was born in 1930 in Detroit. His father was a businessman, his mother a politician. 'I was probably impossible as a child,' he says, all elongated vowels in a voice somewhat raddled by 65 years of cigarettes. 'But it's very hard to judge oneself, you know? As soon as I tasted things like foie gras I demanded it - screamed and yelled if I didn't get it. You know, that sort of thing.'

He visited New York for the first time aged 15, an event he seems to recall primarily in sartorial terms. 'I had a grey herringbone Chesterfield coat with a grey velvet collar and yellow chamois gloves. I must say at 15 I was quite good-looking and I was allowed to smoke by my mother only using a Dunhill filter Denicotea cigarette holder. So if you can imagine me at 15… mmm-hmm.'

You must have looked great, I oblige. 'I looked like a freak. Anyway, I got away with it. I fell madly in love with New York and that was that; I was never going back.' Not for the last time in our conversation he bursts into croaky song: 'How you gonna keep them back on the farm after they've seen Paree?'

In fact, he had to wait a few years before moving to Manhattan. First he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. He proudly shows me his ridiculously glamorous yearbook picture. 'I told them,' he says drily, 'to back-light it, like Beaton.' Then, aged 22, he made it to New York, working in the art department at American
Vogue
, 'sneaked in', he says, by Alexander Liberman, the magazine's art director. After that he went to work for the French shoe designer Roger Vivier, which entailed spending time in Paris: 'The best part of it was I had an American Express credit card so I could play rich, although I was poor.'

Jewellery design was almost an accident. He began in 1961 while working for the designer Arnold Scaasi, when, 'just for fun', he made some cheap earrings and bangles to match Scaasi's shoes. Then the
New York Times
wrote about them, so he called his friend Gloria Fiori, who worked as the jewellery buyer for the American wholesaler Genesco.

'She bought six pairs of earrings and they sold in six minutes - boom! I was in business. In one month I was selling in every store in New York. Very rapid. But then you have to work, you see. So for two years I really worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. I'd go to a party and come back to my office, take my tuxedo jacket off and pack jewellery and write invoices.'

Lane is an inveterate and self-confessed name-dropper. His book,
Faking It
, is as bejewelled with celebrity mentions as it is faux rubies: Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Lena Horne and every First Lady going have all worn his designs. It seems he knows everyone in New York.

'Weeeeell, I know everyone I want to know. I mean I don't go to people's houses whom I wouldn't have back to mine, let's put it that way. You know? I mean, you can see my apartment on…' - he gestures impatiently - 'what do you call it? The… the um, on… on…' Online? 'Online. On the New York Social Diary.'

He invokes names such as C Z Guest, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland and sighs. 'You know, they really had style, not only in what they wore, but the way they walked, the way they talked. Talking is important - too bad they don't give voice lessons more often today. And the way they lived, the way they entertained, their houses. I don't mean they had to have huge houses, although some did, but they just had style. Style and chic are not the same things. Chic is sort of being
au courant
. Style is not.'

And is there too much chic and not enough style now? 'Well, there's never too much chic, but there ain't enough style, no,' says Lane.

Does he feel that Britney Spears, who's also worn his creations, perhaps doesn't compare to women such as Vreeland et al? He goes to speak several times, opening and closing his mouth, then sighs. 'I've never met Britney Spears, I'm sure she's very nice. All these girls… do they have real style? Some of them are pretty, but they all rather look alike, you know? Just like American women of a certain age look alike, because they all go to the same plastic surgeon and hairdresser and they kiss me at a big party and I don't know which one they are.'

Lane once declared, 'I am myself a fabulous fake,' and his global success seems all the more outrageous when you consider that it has essentially amounted to selling fakes to the rich. Jackie Kennedy was among his devoted clientèle and some KJL pearls that she owned were sold for $211,000 at Sotheby's in 1996. She also had him copy some of her valuable pieces so she could wear the fakes instead. Perhaps, I suggest, his work has acquired a respectability that he never sought? 'I hope not!' he retorts. 'But years ago, maybe 30 years ago, Andy Warhol put a pair of earrings of mine into a space capsule. So that amused me.'

Did you know him, I ask unnecessarily. 'Vvvery well,' he purrs. 'I knew him from the old shoe days when he was drawing shoes for I Miller. I remember seeing him in his studio on a ladder drawing the first Campbell's soup can and when it was finished he offered it to me as a gift. He said, "Do you like it?" and I said, "Yeah, Andy, but why not Heinz?" - because I knew the Heinzes. And he said, "Would you like it?" and I said, "Gee, Andy, thanks but I don't know where I'd put it." It would be worth a hundred million dollars today.'

Dressed in a blue double-breasted jacket and with his hair in its trademark side parting ('The straightest part in New York City,' as Diana Vreeland once said), Lane still looks dapper. But there's also a poignancy to his octogenarian fabulousness. A bachelor, he lives alone, as he has for most of his life (he was married briefly in the 1970s). Does he miss the old New York in which he first made his name? 'Nooo,' he says slowly. 'I miss my friends who have… gone away. The thing about maturing is that other people mature before one, and they retire from this earth. I miss women like Diana Vreeland very much, who was a great, great friend. And Babe Paley and Nan Kempner, who more recently died. Pat Buckley, Brooke Astor…'

Not that life is any less glamorous. I'm exhausted simply listening to his forthcoming travel schedule. 'Well, this month I'm going to the Riviera and then to the Dominican [Republic] to see my great friend Oscar de la Renta and his marvellous wife who has great style, great style. Then I'm going to Florence - Cristina Pucci called me this morning to invite me to lunch there at Palazzo Pucci, which is absolutely marvellous, and then I'm going to Rome, to a 75th birthday party, and then I'm going to go to Venice. I have to go to Venice every year. It's one of the few places in the world that has gotten better. Forget the tourists - you can avoid them. They congregate in one part. But the Piazza San Marco was meant for a lot of people. So instead of it being the Turks in the 18th century it's now tourists… Turks looked a little better perhaps than the tourists but… anyway.'

I think he enjoys playing the role of the frightful snob, but really he represents the opposite. 'My great thrill is when I sell something to thousands and thousands and thousands of women. That's why I like QVC particularly. Women who live in Nebraska, where there are no stores… I can reach a huge amount of people and make them happy.'

He walks me round the showroom, past cases and cases of glittering stuff, including plenty of his favourite motifs, 'coral, coral, coral. And animooools and snakes.' I ask him if there's anyone left he'd still like to see wearing his jewels.

'Well! Aha!' and his eyes light up as he tells me that a friend who's 'very high up in the Vatican' - a prince, naturally - is going to take him to see the Vatican jewels. 'So I said, "Well, I think I should give the Pope a ring or a cross." And he said, "A cross would be much better, he loves crosses." So' - he holds up a hefty mock-ruby number - 'I'm going to give him this.' He raises his eyebrows and gives a roguish little chuckle: 'Why not?'